Both the Pentagon shooter and the Texas I.R.S. attacker were motivated by a virulent distrust of the U.S. government, the distrust mutating into desperation and violence with the assistance of personal problems and emotional instability. We would be foolish, however, to dismiss the two as mere “wingnuts,” the current term of choice to describe political extremists who have gone around the bend. They are a vivid warning of America’s future, for the media, partisan commentators, the two political parties and our elected officials are doing their worst to convert all of us into wingnuts, and the results could be even more disastrous than the fanciful horrors the Left and the Right tell us that the other has planned for us. Continue reading
The Internet
Drudge Gets Careless, and the Right Bites
The conservative blogosphere and Rightish talk radio hosts were all in a lather this morning: according to Matt Drudge’s “Drudge Report,” President Obama’s physicians “recommended” “moderation of alcohol intake”! What could that mean, they asked breathlessly, then with a snicker or two, except that “Mr. Perfect” has been hitting the sauce, raiding the liquor cabinet, and having one-too-many snorts of the ol’ hooch? After all, the doctors were telling the President to “moderate” his drinking habits, like you tell a hot-head to moderate his temper. Scoop! The President drinks too much! Continue reading
To Ethics Alarms Readers: Apology Time
Boy, there were a lot of typos today! I think I fixed them all, but I want to apologize to the many readers of the original versions. The fact that I was writing posts while running around like a headless chicken was my problem, not yours, and my duties of competence and diligence, not to mention professionalism. required me to either meet proper editing standards or not post at all.
I thank you all for your tolerance, and will strive to do better, because you deserve better.
It would sure help if I could learn to proofread.
TGIF Ethics Round-up: Killer Whales, Palin-Hatred, MagicJack and More
Brief ethics notes on a wild week…
- How dare the killer whale be a killer?…Tilikum, the killer whale who either playfully or maliciously killed his trainer at Orlando’s Sea World this week, will apparently stay in the facility. Some pundits (the ones I have heard were of the foaming-at-the-mouth conservative fanatic variety) regard it as absurd not to put down a murderous whale when a dog, bear or tiger that similarly ended a human life ( Tilikum may have ended three) would routinely be destroyed. One doesn’t have to be a PETA dues-payer to see this as advocacy for blatantly unfair retribution. Let’s see: Sea World takes a top-of-the-food-chain predator out of the oceans out of its natural environment, earns admission fees by making it perform tricks for the amusement of humans in a theme park, pays relatively tiny and fragile trainers to interact with the three ton beast, and when the predators does what it is naturally designed to do—kill—we blame the whale? Continue reading
Ethics Dunce: PZ Myers
PZ Myers, according to his blog, Pharyngula, is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota. Yesterday, however, he was just one more arrogant, mean-spirited bully (if this were not an ethics blog, I would have used the term “jackass”), ridiculing Catholics who chose to follow the traditions of their church by displaying a smudge of ash on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday.
Like all bullies, he chose the weakest and most defenseless targets for his attack: “little old ladies,” whose religious devotion made him want to “pull out a hankie, spit on it, and clean them up.” Continue reading
Unethical Website: The Brittany Murphy Foundation
This is strange in so many ways, not the least of which being that TMZ, the generally worthless celebrity gossip website, is responsible for blowing the whistle.
Actress Brittany Murphy, best known for her break-out role as the cool-girl wannabe in “Clueless,” collapsed and died in the shower in December, another apparent victim of too much stress, too many diets, and too many prescription drugs in her system. “The Brittany Murphy Foundation,” set up by her family and husband, Simon Monjack, began soliciting contributions on its website in January, supposedly for arts education for children. TMZ received a tip that something was amiss, did some investigation, and discovered that no such foundation had been registered with either the IRS or the State of California. Continue reading
Stats, Polar Bears, and “Truth by Repetition”
When I did marketing for a company that created annuities for the recipients of large court damages, I was armed with alarming statistics I had gleaned from the annuity industry’s publications. Half of the recipients of large lump sum settlements or damages from personal injury and medical negligence lawsuits had dissipated all of the funds (usually calculated to last a lifetime) within two years or less. More than 75% had blown through all the cash, often millions of dollars, within five years. These figures were accepted as fact everywhere, and we used them profitably to persuade plaintiffs, lawyers and courts to approve annuity arrangements that would parcel out the funds over the years, keeping the money safe from needy relatives and spending sprees. Then, one day, I decided to track down the studies that were the sources of the statistics I was using.
There weren’t any. I discovered a circular trail, with various sources quoting each other. Continue reading
Correction: S.C. Law Still Ridiculous, But Not Brilliant
It appears that South Carolina’s mandated registration of “subversive agents” is far from new, as erroneously reported here. The law dates from 1951—when Joe McCarthy was in full flower—so it is clearly not aimed at terrorists, but at “Commies,” being a relic of the Red Scare at the dawn of the Cold War. Apparently the legislature has attempted to repeal it in recent years and failed, but that doesn’t make the law any less archaic.
<Sigh!>
Blogs like this one rely on secondary sources, and when one of them jumps the gun or gets its facts wrong, the result is that we end up aiding and abetting negligent misinformation. True: Ethics Alarms is in the business of adding ethics perspective to news stories and current events as it understands them, so the analysis can sometimes still be useful even if the facts are wrong. That is insufficient justification for contributing to misinformation, however. The key, as usual, is trust. I will do the best I can to get the facts right, hope that my readers correct me when they are wrong, and be ready to correct the record.
As for South Carolina’s silly law, perhaps the revived publicity of its 1951 paranoia will embarrass it into finally getting this dinosaur off the books. That will constitute a good result from a botched story, I suppose.
Many thanks to Sherrif Ray Nash, who tracked down the truth for Ethics Alarms.
Unethical Website, the Sequel
The Special Olympics, now in the business of censoring the English language, has applied technology to the task with a new website, http://www.rwordcounter.org. The site allows one to enter a URL and have the site immediately searched for the offending words “retard,” and “retarded,” sort of like little teeny versions of Big Brother’s thought-police rifling through your closets and under your mattresses for bootleg copies of The Bible or Paradise Lost. Then, once the website under surveillance passes the Special Olympics Appropriate Senstitivity and Inoffensive Expression Test, it can proudly display a banner that proclaims it Clean.
Too bad the website itself is unethical, for two reasons:
1. Its purpose violates the ethical values of autonomy, fairness, tolerance, equity, openness, process, respect, and American citizenship, and
2. It is incompetent and a fraud: the damn thing doesn’t work, or at least didn’t the two times I tried it on Ethics Alarms. Apparently I could make a terrible joke here about who must have designed the site, and it would still tell me that my site was “r-word free.” I am thinking the joke, however, and hope that when the folks at the Special Olympics devise a way to detect that, as I’m certain they would love to do, their R-Word Brain Purging Unit works just as well.
Sunday Ethics Trio: CREW, Coercion and Condiments
The C Street Horror…Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington appears to have jumped the rails in its hysterical protest of President Obama appearance at the National Prayer Breakfast, a venerable if odd event that dates from the Eisenhower administration. Some of CREW’s objections are that the event’s organizers, a group with the admittedly sinister-sounding name “The Family,” preaches “an unconventional brand of Christianity,” (As does Rev. Wright. So what?) lacks transparency (Just like the Obama administration of late. This is a matter worth investigating, exposing and reforming, but if the President has to boycott organizations based on a lack of transparency, he’ll be living on the streets), has been “linked” to unsavory causes (Translation: CREW doesn’t like the group’s politics), and that the C Street Christian home the group maintains in Washington has housed a lot of politicians with ethical problems, like Gov. Mark Sanford and Sen John Ensign. That’s a bizarre complaint, don’t you think? Continue reading
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